by Phil Rickman
‘Gyles. Little toe-rags from one-parent families, with only five convictions for TWOC and crack by the age of seventeen – they don’t go to prison, on account of the System says we have to give them a chance to turn their little lives around. Respectable, middle-class, liberal-minded gentlemen with good incomes, however, who sadly fall from grace just the once . . .’ Bliss dropped his hands, sat up hard. ‘Bang! That was your cell door, Gyles. I’d say five months.’
Enjoying this now. The day having totally turned around when they were leaving Gyles’s place in daylight and he’d looked up at a window of the house across the double drive, and seen a face peering out.
Gyles looked at his solicitor, who clicked his case shut and set it down beside his chair.
‘How do you collect the coke?’ Bliss said.
‘They . . . bring it to my shop. In cardboard boxes. Cardboard boxes I’ve given them. As if it’s supplies from a wholesaler.’
Banks-Jones’s had turned out to be the jewellers – oh, the irony of it – from whom they’d bought Kirsty’s engagement ring. Gyles’s dad had run the shop, back then.
‘And when you say they . . .?’
No answer. For the first time, Bliss smelled fear. There was a particular person here that Gyles really did not want to finger. Someone who very much knew where he lived.
‘How was it sourced, Gyles? Take me back. How’d you make the first contact?’
‘I . . . I teach at the art college, one day a week. Jewellery. Someone I met there . . . I can’t—’ Gyles shook his head as though he’d just woken up. ‘I can’t do this. I have to live in this city. These people are not criminals.’
‘Who aren’t?’
‘Certainly none of the people at last night’s party. Or the person who introduced me to . . . to . . .’
‘. . . To the real criminals?’
‘We keep them at very much arm’s length. None of us can be seen to . . . We’re all either self-employed, with all the stress that involves these days, or with taxing jobs. We’re not . . . lowlife. It’s about relaxation, unwinding . . . recovery space.’
Bliss said, ‘You’re a twat, Gyles. You know that?’
‘Do you know what some of these people are like?’
‘Jes—Of course I know what these people are like. On which basis, I’d far rather put them away than you. So let’s start again, shall we? Play your cards right, you could be home for Christmas dinner – which I’d guess tastes better from a nice plate rather than one of them tin trays with little compartments. So let’s talk about the friends and neighbours whose senses you help to stimulate. Would that include the man next door, by any chance?’
‘Why can’t you just charge me and—?’
‘Let you go round and warn everybody? Please, Gyles, don’t insult my intelligence. You know what I’m after.’
‘Look . . . I keep my distance. I don’t try to get to know them. And if I’d known what sort of people they were, I would never have—’
‘How do you know what sort of people they are?’
‘I know where they live. Roughly.’
‘Let me take a wild guess – the Plascarreg? Don’t worry, I gather nobody can get out of there today, with the Belmont roundabout only open for canoes.’
‘This is unbearable,’ Gyles Banks-Jones said. ‘This is an absolute nightmare.’
35
Paganus
PAGANISM WAS ALL over this church: glistening in the holly on the sills, glowing dully in the red apple held by Eve in a window that was more about orchard fertility than original sin.
Merrily paused, looking down into the central aisle, meeting nobody’s eyes. She had some lights on, high in the rafters over the nave, and a couple of spots. Say it.
‘Last week, I was virtually accused of being one.’
A pagan.
Better if there’d been more people to hear it, but the Sunday before Christmas you rarely got many in church. And it would get around – these things always did.
Secretly standing on a hassock, Merrily gripped the sides of a high Gothic pulpit that was too big for her. Never really liked the pulpit. A glorified play-fort.
She’d told them there were things that needed saying about Coleman’s Meadow. What it meant for the village.
About thirty-five punters; could be worse with Sunday opening, all those last-minute presents to buy. Which reminded her, with a jolt, that she’d need to get over to Knights Frome to pick up the Boswell guitar. Could she fit that in before tonight’s meditation?
No – phew – it was OK. No Sunday evening meditation this week; it was happening on Christmas Eve instead. Tomorrow. God. The medieval sandstone walls seemed to close together under the lights, crushing her like a moth.
She closed her eyes, drew a breath. The noise in the windows was like a battering of arrows. The relentless thuggery of the rain had awoken her well before the sky was diluted into daylight, so vicious you expected to find craters in the road. She raised her voice against it. ‘Most of us will be aware of the archaeologists who started work yesterday. They could even be working this morning – I don’t think I see any of them here.’
Just as well, perhaps.
Last night had been almost unprecedented. Jane looking cowed, hunted. Not even angry, just . . . dulled and unreachable. From the moment they’d got back Eirion had kept looking at Merrily, his eyes clouded with worry, wide with mute appeal: do something.
In the end, Lol had created an opening, announcing he’d had an unexpected cheque from album sales in Germany. Enough to buy them all dinner at the Black Swan.
Jane had looked immediately panicked, said she was, like, really tired? Merrily, throwing Lol a glance, had said why didn’t he and Eirion go to the Swan, talk music and stuff? Eirion having met Lol before he’d even known Jane, back when he was in a schoolboy rock band with the son of Lol’s psychotherapist friend Dick Lyden. Merrily thinking that if she didn’t get the full facts out of Jane, Lol would at least hear it from Eirion.
When they’d gone she’d built up the fire in the parlour, and they’d sat for two hours going over the implications.
‘The bottom line,’ Merrily told Lol on the phone, after midnight, ‘is that this has virtually destroyed archaeology for her. It’s something she’s never going to forget – or be allowed to. And if you take away the possibility of some ancient magic in the distant past and all you’re left with is . . .’
‘Bits of pottery and old bones,’ Lol said. ‘Not enough for Jane.’
‘I can’t believe he could do that to her.’
She’d been on the mobile in her bedroom, Eirion and Jane in their separate beds a floor apart. Presumably.
‘She was in the way,’ Lol said. ‘He’d had a bad morning, and Jane was in the way.’
‘And the dowser he threatened to impale on his own rods?’
‘Just warming up. Jane tell you how relaxed he was afterwards, when he’d turned it around?’
‘And that tells you what? As a psychotherapist.’
‘Failed psychotherapist. It may, of course, be nothing to do with psychology, just cold professionalism. It’s the Trench One format, isn’t it, now? It’s had to become one of those programmes founded on friction, confrontation.’
‘Cruelty.’
‘But the victims have to look like they deserve it. I’m guessing Blore had been encouraging Jane to get carried away with her own discovery, so she’d come over as a bit . . . you know, precocious, full of herself. Get the audience on Blore’s side before he . . .’
‘Takes her down?’
‘With a beautifully timed joke. At the end of a sequence leaving him looking witty and sharp. Couldn’t’ve been better with a script.’
‘You think maybe there was a script?’
‘Probably nothing that formal, but the way Eirion told it, it just struck me that the student had been set up as a feed. Obviously, you’d never prove that. And if you could . . . so what? It’s Blore’s job.’
‘I had to stop Eirion going for him in the pub.’
‘Blore was there?’
Merrily supposed that was why Jane hadn’t wanted to go near the Swan.
‘Mr Conviviality,’ Lol said. ‘Buying nearly as many drinks as he consumed. Eirion wanted to threaten him with bad publicity. It wouldn’t’ve helped. Eirion’s not a journalist yet. Blore would’ve swatted him like a wasp.’
‘You think there’s anything we can do to stop it going out?’
‘Probably not by appealing to his sense of moral decency. He’s not going to throw away five minutes of great telly.’
‘No.’
The worst thing about this was that Jane would feel she couldn’t go back to Coleman’s Meadow as long as Blore and his crew were there. So she probably wouldn’t see the stones raised. Her stones.
It had taken Merrily another hour and a half to get to sleep, and then the rain had awoken her twice before she’d given up, struggled into her robe and gone down to make tea before the dawn had arrived like industrial smoke, and the rain had really set in.
Enough of the congregation had been at the parish meeting and knew this already, but it bore repeating.
‘Coleman’s Meadow,’ Merrily said, ‘was already seen as quite a controversial issue because the archaeology could, if it was significant enough, prevent housing development in the village. But there are other possible housing sites, so that’s not so vitally important.’
Except to the people who knew that only full development of Coleman’s Meadow could swiftly open the way for the kind of serious, large-scale expansion that would very soon become unstoppable. A lot of money at stake here, and she was tempted to talk about that . . . but, although Lyndon Pierce wasn’t here, it would get back to him. And his lawyers.
‘The other reason for controversy is that what’s being uncovered is a pagan site. Again, not that many people would see this as a problem.’ Who, in fact, apart from Shirley West? She didn’t look at Shirley in the corner of a pew halfway down the nave in her padded raincoat, but she could feel Shirley looking at her. A public figure now, the postmistress, status.
‘But, because this is basically a religious issue, I suppose I should be the one to address it.’
Focusing on James Bull-Davies because he wasn’t looking at her. James was in the old Bull family pew, an elbow on the prayer-book rack, head lowered into forked forefingers, listening. Two rows behind him, Jim and Brenda Prosser glanced at one another.
Merrily had called in at the shop just before eight, on the way to Holy Communion, and Jim had shown her the Sunday paper spreads.
ROAD-RAGE, PAGAN-STYLE.
The Sunday Telegraph was the only paper to connect the Dinedor Serpent with the Tara Hill row in Ireland, quoting the poet Seamus Heaney and other luminaries on the way that determinedly secular governments, fuelled by fat bags of Euro-loot, were happy to lay tarmac over sacred ground.
In Hereford, the chairperson of the Save the Serpent group was quoted as saying, They’re cutting the ancient umbilical between Hereford and its mother hill.
Lower down, a local landowner said, with some bitterness, If this road was in danger of going through a mosque we’d be diverting it without a second thought.
But had Clem Ayling actually been killed because of his ridiculing of the Serpent? The Telegraph feature writer, maintaining his distance and a healthy irony, had discovered a woman called Sara Starkey, described as a Wiccan High Priestess. Sara, whom Merrily had never encountered, hadn’t held back.
The Serpent was sanctified to the Old Ones. I’ve walked there and, in a psychic state, seen ceremonies of night and fire. I’ve seen a torchlight procession led by Druid priests, clad all in white, moving slowly down the hill towards the river, where the moon’s reflection swims, following the coils of the Serpent. I’ve felt the anger and the sorrow resounding down the ages, and I’m telling you that this road, if it goes ahead, will be subject to forces which no surveyor can control.
Already, one man has been badly injured felling trees on the site. On any road that goes through there, cars and lorries will go wildly out of control, and there’ll be serious accidents. Drivers will be slamming on the brakes for human shapes that do not exist . . . in their world.
Merrily had smiled. Got that one right, then.
But it was interesting, the way the pagan aspect had been emphasised. You’d think nobody else cared. But even Jane’s database suggested that the majority of the Coleman’s Meadow protesters were people with no obvious spiritual affiliation, simply an interest in prehistory and heritage, and the Dinedor Serpent campaigners were likely to be even more orthodox. However, somebody – very probably Annie Howe, via the police press office – had inflated the religious angle. Hence yesterday’s headlines about pagan nutters.
The Telegraph had a picture of Sara, a sharp-faced middle-aged woman with long straight hair standing on the earthen ramparts of Dinedor hill fort.
I’m speaking in sorrow, but from experience. When we ignore the spiritual traditions of the ancestors, in full awareness of what we are doing, we deserve all we get. However, the idea that a Wiccan or a follower of any other earth-related spiritual path would commit a murder is proof only that the accusers know nothing of the pagan way.
Retribution they’d leave to the gods.
Before Lol and Eirion came back from the pub, Merrily had asked Jane about the worst the cops might find on the Coleman’s Meadow database.
‘Do you want me to tell the media that the police took away the computer? I’m prepared to do that. They haven’t brought it back, have they?’
‘No way,’ Jane had said. ‘That would just make you look like . . .’ the kid had found the first and last smile of the night ‘. . . one of us.’
It wasn’t going to be Stonehenge, Merrily said, but even a few modest standing stones re-erected after many centuries – so many centuries that they’d vanished from recorded history – would inevitably be a presence in the village.
‘Even if they’re not as high as me, we’re looking at a significant ancient monument. So was this a pagan monument, buried because it had been seen as anti-Christian? Or because this was a nice flat field and the stones were getting in the way of somebody’s plough? OK, let’s deal with pagan. What do we mean by pagan?’
Quick sweep of the congregation. No significant reaction. Shirley West was no longer looking at her. Shirley was hunched, her head bowed, still as an obelisk.
‘The dictionary tells us – just to be sure, I looked it up this morning – that the word comes from the Latin, paganus, meaning a rustic or peasant. Meaning ordinary people. Like the people who lived here, in this community, before the time of Jesus. Pre-Christian. And what does that mean? Means they didn’t have the benefit of having known about Jesus Christ, who introduced the human race to a new dimension of love, a new understanding of what love can mean. This was sophisticated stuff, and maybe their society wasn’t ready for it.’ Merrily stood on tiptoe on the hidden hassock, leaned over the battlements of the play-fort.
‘But does that mean they were bad people who lived in darkness and sin, with no possibility of eternal life? I don’t think so. I look at where these stones were positioned, possibly to catch the first rays of the midsummer sun when it rose over Cole Hill. These were people who had no doctrine to follow, no commandments. Only their feelings. And their feelings told them to reach for the light. And that’s good enough for me.’
She looked across at the stained-glass window of Eve with the apple, still, unfortunately, brown and unlustred. Bloody rain.
‘I’m not inclined to worry about pagans, past or present. They at least represent some kind of spirituality. The Bronze Age people were aware of higher forces, which they responded to. These were the people who first developed this community, then kept it going, fed it, tended livestock, planted the first orchards . . . created what our old friend Lucy Deve
nish, taking her cue from the poet Thomas Traherne, used to call the Orb.’
She looked up at the apple shapes outlined in the filigree of the rood screen.
‘What did Lucy mean by that? I think she was talking about the idea of Ledwardine as a living organism sustained by an energy and an intelligence beyond ours. Don’t know about you, but I’d tend to call that God.’
Down at the bottom of the nave, the latch went up on the main door, with a clank, and rain swept in, bringing with it Gomer Parry in his old gabardine mac that was soaked through and tied at the waist with baler twine. Gomer shut the door behind him, took off his flat cap, drips falling onto the worn skull indented into the memorial stone of John Jenkyn, d. seventeen hundred and something. Gomer and the stone spotlit from above.
‘All I know for certain,’ Merrily said, ‘is that this – this church – became and remains the centre of the Ledwardine orb. So I’d say let’s do it. Let’s raise the stones, because they’re about the dawning of spirituality in Ledwardine – that first reaching for the light. I think they can only strengthen us.’
She looked down at the sermon pad, which she hadn’t consulted once. She saw Shirley West stand up, as grey and still as the pillars.
‘Can we sing number fourteen in your carol book. “In the Bleak Midwinter”. Softly wind made—’
‘You are disgusting.’
Shirley’s forefinger quivering, before she turned and went scuttling down the aisle, pushing past Gomer to get to the door, and Edna Huws hit the opening chords.
Gomer shambled up the aisle as Merrily came down from the pulpit. They met at the bottom of the chancel steps.
‘Quick word, vicar,’ Gomer said under some ragged, nervy singing. ‘Only I needs to get back, see.’
In the old days, the bells would have been rung.
Clanging down the valley, peeling through the rain, to be echoed by the bells of Weobley and Dilwyn and Pembridge and Eardisland. A chain of warning, ley lines of alarm spearing across the county.